What’s WRONG with Richard Cordray of the CFPB? Tell Me How Can This Happen?
“Reverse Mortgage Foreclosures On the Rise, Seniors Targeted for Scams,” is the sensationalistic scare tactic chosen by The Huffington Post. It quotes Richard Cordray, Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (“CFPB”), and among other crazy things, he says that seniors with reverse mortgages are going into foreclosure “at an alarming rate.”
How in the world can a reverse mortgage go into foreclosure?
Cordray claims 10 percent of reverse mortgages are in default or foreclosure, but since there are no mortgage payments to miss when you have a reverse mortgage, the only way this could possibly be true is if he’s talking about people who are unable to pay their property taxes.
If that’s what we’re talking about, wouldn’t the people be in foreclosure anyway… with any type of mortgage? Because if you can’t pay your property taxes, there’s no way you could pay your mortgage payment AND your property taxes, right? Of course that’s right.
So, why does Cordray make it sound like he’s describing a problem with reverse mortgages when he’s actually not? Why is he scaring seniors away from a reverse mortgage, when it could transform their lives, or save their homes, or any number of other positive things?
Why is he misinforming seniors when by doing so, they may not get access to hundreds of thousands of dollars that’s available to them? Doesn’t he realize the difference hundreds of thousands of dollars can make in someone’s life in later years?
I don’t understand how Cordray can do what he did here, under the guise of “protecting seniors?”
However, I thought Cordray’s best line in the HuffPo hit piece, hands down, was when when he said that the agency found that:
“… seniors often don’t really understand the terms of the loan, a problem exacerbated by deceptive mailings and other advertisements.”
Richard actually thinks that it’s mailings and advertisements that are confusing seniors?
What about the countless articles in the mainstream media containing little more than inaccurate hype and deceptive scare tactics that are sure to confuse seniors… because they certainly have confused me. You know, like THE ONE HE’S QUOTED IN that I’m writing about right now and that ran in the Huffington Post. Or the ones I wrote about HERE, that ran in Forbes Magazine, or ABC News, the Washington Post and too many others.
Cordray isn’t concerned about biased, inaccurate and incomplete coverage by the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC News or all the rest… they can all get it entirely wrong and mislead seniors about reverse mortgages. But, he is concerned about mailers and advertisements?
Yeah, that makes total sense because whenever I hunger for knowledge or am seeking information, I always first check my mailbox to see if there’s any junk mail that’s arrived on the subject.
The irony of Richard Cordray warning of mailings and advertisements misinforming seniors about reverse mortgages, while being quoted in an article that’s doing exactly that on steroids, is overwhelming.
How does this happen, and why doesn’t anyone care?
Mandelman out.